As an Irishwoman I cannot but be grateful to this big Saxon giant for his generous advocacy of a famous country-woman whom posterity persists in holding spotted. He has taken her up in the teeth of British opinion, and being deeply enamoured of the splendid creature, he is not satisfied in proceeding to whitewash her, which would have been a simple enough task, but he has clothed her in soft cloud and fine radiance, he has all but sketched her wings, and shown her standing tip-toe on hard, solid earth with glance strained ethereally upward. Not by any means an angel, but a young goddess, half woman, a creature of exquisite freshness, originality, bewildering wit and soaring intellect, as lovely as Aurora, and as cold, purer still, and more remote from the contamination of gross masculine admiration, than Diana. Her mind flies upon barbed phrases. Her commonest words take the shape of pointed, illuminated arrows. She is the beautiful Egeria of a young minister of state, the immaterial soul of a polished old statesman, by whom she almost loses her social head, and is only saved from the block by the stout defence of her devoted friends. She is sunshine in a delicate and not happy lady’s life, carrying a whiff of Irish mirth and wit with her delightful presence into the stately and decorous gloom of English town and country existence, a mental draught of champagne wherever she goes, all impulse and brightness and warmth of heart. And how this masterful knight of hers, turned biographer, lashes those who were stupid and wicked enough to misjudge her! For every tear, every painful contraction of brow, they forced her to in life, are they punished by his unsparing pen. He uses it in her defence like a true crusader’s sword. He reviews her enemies in an almost passionate anger, names them, notes every conventional trick and fault, lays bare the tiniest spot upon which to point his dreadful lamp of ridicule, and then proceeds to shiver their self-respect to atoms, to disperse their highly-prized, respectable prejudices, and leaves them divested of all but heavy British stupidity, that prevents them from seizing the charm and comprehending the personality of this brilliant young star shot from the Sister Isle into their astonished midst. Her freshness is the eternally vernal freshness of the shamrock, her faults and impulses the voice of a generous race seeking expression through her ardent soul. He makes her enemies his enemies. He wears her colours nobly, gallantly, as behoves a gentleman in whom the mediæval strain still runs. He carries her gloriously through the divorce courts, leaving her wooden Saxon husband, of narrow, official soul, utterly abased and shrunken, instead of triumphant in her fall. We behold her after this crucial ordeal clearer, whiter, more radiant than ever; nearer to the immortal Diana she images by reason of her new freedom; clear-eyed as a maiden returned to the forest-mists of unsullied